Qualla: Eastern Mennonite University

Eastern Mennonite University: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Barrows, CC0. Leymah Gbowee earned her master's degree at Eastern Mennonite University in 2007. Four years later she shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the women's nonviolent movement she led that helped end the Second Liberian Civil War. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the president of Somalia, attended EMU's Summer Peacebuilding Institute in 2001. The university in the Shenandoah Valley, founded by Mennonites in 1917 to keep their young people out of secular colleges, has somehow become one of the most internationally connected institutions in American higher education - not through size or wealth, but through a graduate program in conflict transformation that has trained more than 3,000 peacebuilders from 124 countries.

Image: Daniel Barrows | CC0

Eastern Mennonite University: A School Born of Distrust of the World

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dyoder, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eastern Mennonite School opened in 1917 in Harrisonburg with a clear premise: Mennonite young people, the founders believed, were enrolling in secular universities and losing their faith there. Bishop George R. Brunk Sr., one of the founders, declared that worldly education was "...

Image: Dyoder | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eastern Mennonite University: Integration in 1948

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dyoder, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1948, EMU admitted a local Black student, making it one of the first historically white colleges in the U.S. South to integrate - sixteen years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision drew on Mennonite peace-church theology and the practical organizing of a few Menno...

Image: Dyoder | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eastern Mennonite University: The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dyoder, CC BY-SA 3.0. EMU hosts the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, established in 1994. Its graduate program in conflict transformation - a term coined by founding director John Paul Lederach - rejects the language of conflict resolution in favor of something more ambitious: transforming the co...

Image: Dyoder | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eastern Mennonite University: Wrestling with Itself

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dyoder, CC BY-SA 3.0. EMU's Community Lifestyle Commitment, adopted in 2001, set expectations for behavior on campus that were typical of conservative religious colleges - including a reservation of sexual relationships to heterosexual marriage. The policy was used for years to terminate faculty membe...

Image: Dyoder | CC BY-SA 3.0